To meet the challenges of post-pandemic era, companies should emphasize on crafting a talent strategy that develops team players’ critical digital and cognitive competences, their adaptability and resilience and their social and emotional skills. Developing this muscle will help the companies to strengthen their foundations to deal firmly with any future disruptions emerging as a consequence of this crisis.
Remote working has become the need even before the crisis, but the pandemic has rooted that telecommuting is here to stay. Companies have also faced a learning curve as managers figured out the strategies to lead their teams virtually as a part of building social capital. As companies are planning their return to the workplace, a whole new set of skills is also likely to emerge for the transition.
For example, during the Ebola crisis, companies operating in West Africa set the objective of rapidly improving their post-crisis performance. It executed a comprehensive skill strategy that helped them to return to the physical workplace in a much smoother manner. The strategies structured the pavement for introduction of new skills and training policies that boosted the performance, and, last but not least, worked towards creating a more profoundly engaged workforce. These companies ardently distinguished between the critical and noncritical set of required skills for their return and, apprehending that their workforce lacked flexibility, the leaders made swift move to upskill the involved team members in adjacent skill areas. These strategies and set of approaches yielded several benefits for the organization.
The current learning landscape has altered in ways that will foster philosophy of upskilling and teaching new skills to the employees, not limiting to the physical presence of the companies. COVID-19 has hastened the adoption of completely digitized approaches to reconstruct the eminent of in-person learning using live video and social sharing techniques as a significant platform. This transformation makes it potentially feasible to scale-up learning efforts in a more lucrative way and permits to create greater personalization for learners, considering greater effectiveness in future prospects.
Skilling trends that are expected to speed up post-crisis
Company leaders can refurbish their learning philosophy by structuring digital training programs and crafting an ecosystem of learning-partners to create and deliver digital content swiftly to a large number of employees. To do so the leaders will have to master these three key trends majorly.
New expertise for the ‘distance economy’
The crisis has hastened the echelons of digitization to reduce unnecessary and avoidable physical interactions. This strategy has lead to find the ways to reinvent work and, in a few cases, a partial commotion of jobs and to an extend changing the approaches workers performed them earlier.
Disparity in talent supply and demand
The pandemic has changed not only the followed approaches by people working at their workstations or places but it has also brought a drastic change in how they shop and eat, even the basic patterns of movement and travelling. In this way, the COVID-19 pandemic is setting up what could be enduring employment-landscape shifts that could necessitate the extensive reskilling of new employees.
Digital platforms are assisting companies to bridge-up the supply and demand disparity, serving as the common link between the companies that are hiring the new talents and workers who will require some degree of reskilling.
Alteration in supply chains
With the alteration in sourcing and production trajectories- moving closer to the ultimate users, the catastrophe could trigger a restructuring in the existing supply chains. As companies are now focusing on localizing or regionalizing them, this will create a shift in the skills focusing on what and where questions, that is, skills that will be needed in the domain along with the focus on geographic territory. Global companies may take crucial decisions of moving their production units closer to their point of sales. South Korea’s electronics players and Japan’s automakers may possibly accelerate their diversification of the manufacturing footprints beyond China. Frances’ President Emanuel Macron has already confirmed a pre-crisis program to relocate the strategic industries back to the nation. As a consequence of these global strategic interventions, some core automatable activities will possibly be onshored in the subsequent span of 12 to 18 months, emphasizing to fabricate the domestic value chains for significant products and industries, like pharmaceuticals and food products.